UPDATED (21st December, 2016): The death toll has risen to at least 12 – with dozens more injured – after a truck ploughed into a crowded Christmas market in central Berlin on Monday night.
Police, who have reportedly told media at the scene they believed the crash was the result of a deliberate act, said 48 people were injured in the incident at Breitscheidplatz, which is close the Kurfuerstendamm, one of the city’s main commercial streets. One suspect was arrested and a second person died inside the truck.
A spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel said via social media that they were “in mourning for the dead and hope that the many injured can get help”.
In a statement, the German President Joachim Gauck said Monday night was an “awful evening for Berlin and for our country” while Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he was “deeply shaken by the news”.
Australian woman Trisha O’Neill, who was sitting just metres away from where the incident took place, told the ABC there were “blood and bodies everywhere” after the incident.
“I just saw this huge black truck speeding through the markets crushing so many people and then all the lights went out and everything was destroyed,” she said. “I could hear screaming and then we all froze. Then suddenly people started to move and lift all the wreckage off people, trying to help whoever was there.”
The attack was evocative of one in Nice, France, last July in which more than 80 people were killed when a truck drove through a beach front crowd who had gathered to watch Bastille Day fireworks. That attack was claimed by the so-called Islamic State.
